Wine Investing
Bill (CEO of WineLog) did a quick little post on Wine Investing over at the WineLog blog and introduced me to a site called WineInvestor.com.
A good site to learn about wine investing is wineinvestor.com. Wine Investor is collecting (in one place) all the types of information I would need to explore investing in wine. The guy that runs Wine Investor is from the financial services field, works with technology, and loves wine. What a killer resume.
Investing in wine could be a great way to diversify your portfolio. Especially if, like me, you already have a passion for wine. WineInvestor calls it an alternative investment, specifically a “collectible”, and suggests about 5% allocation in collectibles in this article on asset allocation and diversification. (Let’s see, that means I need to go shopping for about $1500 in wine. Nice!)
Here are some other great articles from WineInvestor. New posts are added about once a week or so.
- Wine Market Potential (do you want 15% annual returns?)
- Wine Futures (here too)
- Watch Expenses Like a Hawk (something familiar to us stock traders)
- Other Wine Investments (with a list of wine “investment funds”)
- Which Ratings Rule Wine Investing (soon WineLog ratings too I hope)
6 Comments Add your ownSubscribe
1. Phil | July 7th, 2007 at 7:06 am
I like the idea of starting your own winery better!!!
“Asset allocation” to yoru own vineyard comes after you have made your money on the stock market.
:D
Phil
2. Christian Gross | July 7th, 2007 at 10:18 am
While I can understand why some people would do wine investing I would be wary.
1) There are plenty of folks that copy. They get old bottles from good brands, and then fill it with cheap wines. That’s why many wine folks crush the wine bottles of really expensive wines.
2) Wine is fickle. I think if you wanted to do real wine investing you need to get the wine directly from the grower. The moment that there is a middle person your profit goes out the window. I have close to 1000 bottles and about half are from the grower or are bought in the region where they grow the wine. Living in Switzerland has its perks in terms of distance. This also avoids the problem of getting ripped off by people and being able to verify the authenticity of the wine.
3) The key in wine is not to get what everybody raves about, but knowing what everybody WILL rave about. Again this goes back to going to the vineyard and buying directly.
4) I bought some of my wines about eight years ago on the cheap, now the same brands are much more expensive. Granted I needed a place to store them, but the end result is worth the money.
I think doing anything else than that is “trendy” and you will probably be disappointed by the return. And it is fun to buy directly from the grower themselves. I remember one time when I bought some wine in Austria the guy sat down with us and drank his own wine. We had a time to chat and learn about who he was and why his wine was interesting…
3. Christian Gross | July 7th, 2007 at 10:26 am
I just looked at how much some of my wines are worth. Wow I am impressed a quite a few of my bottles that I bought about five years ago doubled in price. Cool… Though its not like I am going to sell the wine…. I would rather drink it myself, or give it away to other people…
4. Winevestor | July 8th, 2007 at 5:23 pm
Jason, thanks for the shout out for my WineInvestor site. Wine investing is a controversial subject, and it has been fun focusing on the positive (making some money out of my passion) and minimizing the negative (debating with the naysayers who say investing wine is intrinsically bad).
I agree with Christian that you only shoud invest in wine if you know what you are doing and what its provenance is. There are only about 100 wines wihch are good, solid investment bets, so it does make it easy, IF you know what they are. Don’t get carried away by the wines that you love, they may not be great investment wines.
The one area I would highlighit is that you do want to buy the wines that the critics rave about. There is nothing worse for investment purposes if there is a great wine that is not followed by Parker - it will not make money. However the good news is that these should be your drinking wines, not your investment wines - they will be much cheaper to buy!
I also agree that there is nothing better than buying directly from the source - it gives your wine acquisition a totally new dimension. Lucklly for Christian the vast majority of Investment Grade Wine (IGW) is in Europe - its expensive for us Americans to visit the source and expensive to import it - the import rules are painful.
5. James T | July 9th, 2007 at 7:31 pm
Nice find -
I recently started following this wine investing blog: http://classicwines.com/articles.php?cat=21
I have yet to whip out the credit card, and for current moment think I will stick with the ‘ol stock market.
6. Henrik Soke | July 17th, 2007 at 11:48 am
I did some “wine investing” about a year ago… the company’s ticker is WVVI. I liked them so much that I ordered a few bottles of wine from Oregon to Europe, Slovenia
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